Once again, do we want to take bets on whether this will be on the front page of tommorrow's New York Times? Another 20 Shi'ites killed by the glorious Iraqi "resistance," this time in Basra. From the Nov. 1 edition of the UK Independent:

At least 20 people were killed yesterday in a car bomb blast aimed at shoppers in Basra in one of the worst attacks in British-controlled southern Iraq since the war. In Baghdad seven American soldiers were killed, making October the bloodiest month for the US since January.

The carnage continued throughout the country with reports that about 40 people, many of them women and children, had been killed in American air strikes in the west towards the Syrian border.

It was, however, the bombing in Basra, in the Shia heartland, which highlighted the level of anarchy in the country and cast further doubt on the repeated assertions by Tony Blair and George Bush that the security situation was improving in Iraq.

Initial reports indicated that the bombings - which happened as families were out in the streets preparing for the end of Ramadan - did not include any British casualties.

Gee, no British casualties! That's a relief! Because, evidently, nobody cares about the Iraqi dead. Not the global news media, which have now relegated the ongoing daily carnage to a rank of importance somewhere just behind the Pitt-Aniston break-up. Not the US, which is both itself killing Iraqi civilians and provoking this kind of jihadi backlash in its ongoing airstrikes. Not the poorly-named "anti-war" movement in the US, led by idiot left factions which implicitly support this slaughter by giving the Iraqi "resistance" a blank check for our "solidarity," and refusing to actually look at the horrific realities of this "resistance."

Interesting how, as we have noted before, both the pro- and anti-war forces have something invested in denying this reality. For the Bush boys, the daily dead in Iraq are evidence of what a disaster the US adventure has turned into. For the anti-war crowd they are evidence that this war is qualitatively different from Vietnam, thereby raining on their simplistic analogies and slogans. Also note the vivid contrast with Saddam's victims. They are so useful in death that their number somehow keeps mysteriously growing.

It seems the suffering Iraqis have now acheived the special kind of invisibility described by Ralph Ellison:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to posses a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.

See our last post on Iraq.